Saturday, June 28, 2014

Hey, all. As We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven slouches towards publication on August 19th, I've decided to preface it with a bunch of new posts, another alphabetized compendium of themes and characters from the book. Here's the first one, right at the end of June:

A is for All Of Them Witches

The phrase in question references
Rosemary's Baby—it's what the first girl the coven who
eventually foist an antichrist on our titular character tries to warn
her of, with middling results—but primarily it's the phrase that
the term “witch” always sparks in my mind, or maybe my personal
witchcraft hashtag. And it's certainly appropriate here, where so
many of our characters actually are witches, even the ones who
don't identify as such.

The Five-Family Coven is, as its name
suggests, made up of five families whose brief partnership dates back
to the 1600s, when they met during the reign of James the Sixth (of
Scotland) and First (of England). Three of these families trace their
descent back to three women, two peasants and one upwardly mobile,
all witches—a sort of coven inside the coven. The other two are
both artistocratic, one led by a changeling and primarily made up of
her half- and quarter-Fae descendants, the other led by the latest in
a string of hereditary warlocks/heirarchical magicians, who married
into the changeling's family. This class disparity allows the
aristocrats to eventually betray and abandon their non-aristocratic
partners, leaving them to face the mechanics of the Scots
witch-hunting machine, and every bit of bad blood between all five
families can be traced back to that particular source.

My personal opinion about witchcraft,
to head a potential philosophical sidebar off at the pass, is that
obviously it doesn't “work” per se IRL, except in a purely
metaphorical sense. But I've been fascinated since I was very young
by the question of how people could ever think that it did,
both from the witch-hunter angle and the witch/warlock angle. One of
the first places I ran across a precis of the primary Burning Times
myth was in Barbara Ninde Byfield's sadly out of print 1967 The
Book of Weird (also known as The Glass Harmonica: A Lexicon
of theFantastical). It's a sort of proto-Tough Guide
to Fantasyland in many ways, defining and explicating creatures
such as Cockatrices, Dragons, Ghouls etc., while also charting the
differences of degree between linked subjects like Wizards and
Sorceresses, Giants, Ogres and Trolls, or Oafs, Churls, Louts and
Knaves. Yet it also touches here and there on not-so-simple human
evils, like Torture, Punishment and Execution.

Byfield's version of witchcraft makes
it look nasty, brutish and short, definitely spinning on the idea
that the people who ended up accused of witchcraft were, in the main,
poor, indigent, ill and female. They swapped their immortal souls for
a certain amount of temporal power, but like Schrodinger's Cat, it
was the sort which stopped working the minute anybody looked at it
(especially anybody from the Church). And while it's possible that
Colin Wilson has something with his theory that after a while,
people—like Isobel Gowdie, the Scots housewife who just suddenly
confessed to witchcraft, without prompting or torment—might imprint
on the generalized witchcraft narrative and fetishize it, treating it
like the world's most epiphanic S/M fantasy scene, it seems far more
likely to me that for people like the Pendle Witches (see Jeannette
Winterson's The Daylight Gate), witchcraft provided a kind of
outlet for those who felt utterly powerless to effect anything around
them, people to whom the devil would necessarily seem like a better
invisible friend than the God who propped up all the authoritative
structures which kept them excluded.

I also think it's possible to argue
that while there may indeed not have been any “real” witch-cults
at the beginning of the Burning Times—just vaguely pagan
mainly-women (midwives, herballists, etc.) who broke the mold and had
to be put down, or aristocrats whose money and lands the king wanted,
or scapegoats for whom witchcraft accusations were the further
demonization needed to whip public disapproval into a killing
frenzy—there actually might have been some, by the end. That these
might have been second- or third-generation philosophical
“terrorists” who'd seen their families destroyed by witchcraft
accusations, and thought: okay, well, if everyone's going to
assume I'm a witch anyways... then why not form a little cell of similar
malcontents, go down to the graveyard every month and dance
back-to-back, eat filth, act out displays of cursing your neighbours,
kiss the ass of some dude in a devil suit, engage in an orgy, repeat?

When the North Berwick Witches tried to kill King James by melting a
wax doll with his name on it, it may well have been at the
instigation of his cousin Francis Stewart, the Earl of Bothwell, who
himself took on the persona of Black Man at the sabbat: weaponized
witchcraft. The myth come full circle.

Anyhow, that's where the image of
witches in We Will All Go Down Together comes from. I'm not
saying it's true, because it's not. I'm saying “what if?”, and
acting accordingly.

Homepage of writer Gemma Files

Yet More Opening of the Mouth

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About Me

Award-winning horror author Gemma Files is also a film critic, teacher, screenwriter, Writer's Guild of Canada member, wife and mother. In 1999, her story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won an International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction. She sold five of her stories to erotic horror anthology TV series THE HUNGER, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott's Scott Free production company. She wrote the Series Two episodes "Bottle of Smoke" and "The Diarist" herself. Her first novel, A BOOK OF TONGUES, is available right now from ChiZine Publications. It will be followed by two sequels, A ROPE OF THORNS (2011) and A TREE OF BONES (2012). Gemma Files can be contacted at filesgemma@gmail.com